In a restless and ping-ponging profile for Vogue, actor Timothée Chalamet paid a visit to one of the most mystique-intensive artworks of this or any century: Michael Heizer’s monumental Land art installation City. The work, measuring a mile-and-a-half long by a half-mile wide in the desert in Nevada, opened in 2022 after decades of construction dating back to 1970. About Heizer’s creation, Chalamet said, “It’s just a totally remote experience.”
That’s it with regard to art criticism from Chalamet, who talks about a wide range of projects—most notably the new Josh Safdie–directed movie Marty Supreme, in which he plays a former table-tennis champion down on his luck. But he does opine about Annie Liebovitz, the photographer who shot five portraits of Chalamet at City for the story.
“Annie is an absolute beast,” he said. “Sometimes when people become so ubiquitous or iconic, you can lose sight of how much effort goes in. She’s the first one up at 5:30 a.m. You’re coming downstairs, and she’s poring over materials.”
Chalamet continued: “She almost had a crazy compulsive creative attitude. She wasn’t concerned with anything but getting great stuff, and then I’m sure she went on to the next thing.”
As for City, located about 90 minutes northeast of Las Vegas by car, Kristen Swenson wrote in Art in America, “It is a journey, a series of encounters with different landscapes and the systems that operate in and around them.”
About her experience wandering around the work, Swenson wrote, “City makes a void of the desert. We were surrounded by monotone hues of gray and brown and an intense silence that can only be heard far off the grid. This initially felt like a kind of sensory deprivation, but as we adjusted, we began to perceive an abundance of stimuli. We noticed ambient sounds of wind and insects, and City came into focus as a complex visual field.”
Visitation to City is administered by the Triple Aught Foundation and is tightly controlled. As the Vogue story notes, “The site is open three days a week and allows only six visitors per day, but Heizer’s work will be more accessible to New York audiences come February, when Gagosian mounts an exhibition of his new work.”
